The United Fruit Company Outline

After evaluating the Super Project for General Foods, the two main things that management needed to address were the relevant incremental and non-incremental cash flows discussed below and incorporate the NPV and the net cash flows (yearly) to make a decision on whether to accept or reject the project. The start-up costs were determined by splitting up the costs of $160,000 in 1967 and $40,000 in 1968. To calculate the yearly cash flows, I used year 1 through 10, and the gross profit was calculated by subtracting out relative cash flows and the before tax depreciation. The NPV of $169,530 is positive for the 10% discount rate, which is less than the IRR of 11.4%.

Puerto Rico is an agricultural producing country, and some of its major agricultural products are sugar cane, coffee, and tobacco fruits (Doverspike, 2012). However, the agricultural industry is a small part of the major industry in Puerto Rico. According to (Puerto Rico’s Trade and Industries, 2012) some of the major industries in Puerto Rico are manufacturing of a variety of raw material used to produce completed products and this industry is about

     Trade patterns in The South Americas included the Andes Mountains. When The Incas controlled the land in the early 15th century, the people generated extensive trade throughout the hundreds of miles north and south linking together a total of 32 million people. With so many mountains and zones to deal with, many products came out of this to trade, including potatoes, maize, chili peppers, squash, beans and others. Trade between these zones of the north and south, were controlled by semi-divine state rulers. In the Yucatan of Central and South America the Mayan people blossomed from 200-900 B.C.E. By the time The Spanish came in the 1520’s the Yucatan

George Washington Carver boosted southern economy by discovering new uses for the peanut, sweet potato, and soybean.

John Soluri 's Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, (Which for spatial and repetitive purposes, I will refer to as Banana Cultures for the remainder of the paper), introduces the reader to a world of corporate greed, consumption, and environmental change using the history of the common, everyday fruit, the banana. He explores the various political occurrences, health problems, and changes in mass media through the rise of the consumption of the banana in the United States, and around the globe.

Both Franklin and Carver had great success as inventors. However, where Franklin focused on inventions of all aspects, Carver worked in the realm of botany and agriculture. Throughout his career, Carver worked on the problem presented by the soil in the south. Due to overproduction of cotton, the once fertile fields had become dry and unusable. In order to increase production, Carver searched to find a new crop. His answer lay in sweet potatoes, and most importantly, the peanut. (“George Washington Carver”). These crops were able to nourish the soil to its former strength. However, the peanut crop scarcely had demand, so farmers felt there was no need to grow something that could not make a profit. Solving this problem is how George Washington Carver became the “peanut man”. Carver invented over 100 uses for the peanut. These uses included gasoline, plastics, and dyes. Due to Carver’s ingenious ideas, farmers who owned ill-fertilized soil could not grow products for a profit again by interchanging from cotton to peanuts every year. Carver was able to be a benefitting factor in the bettering of the agriculture economy. In fact, by 1920, there were enough peanut farms in the United States to form the United Peanut

Throughout the rich history in the United States tobacco, timber, and alcohol have been very important to the culture in America. Each of these products contributed economically to the colonies. Some have contributed to the shaping of governments and laws. There has recently been a debate about which colonial product was most important to the colonist. Each product has served an important role in building each one of the colonies. Evidence shows that tobacco played the most critical influence on many colonies in early America.

important role in the development of the plot. Idgie’s most popular food innovation was the

We eat bananas almost every day; however, most of us do not really know where these fruits come from. In Banana Cultures, John Soluri focuses on the relationship between banana production in Honduras, especially in the North Coast between roughly 1870 and 1975, and banana consumption in the U. S.. He focuses on growing, protecting, transporting, and mass marketing of bananas. John Soluri integrates Agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history in order to trace the symbolic growth of the banana industry. The author admits that his work is highly interdisciplinary, as a desirable trait in the academic world. The study incorporates a wide range of sources, including manuscript census data from Honduras, fruit company records, published scientific records, Honduran and U.S government correspondence, oral testimonies, and ephemera from U.S mass culture. Throughout his work, he combines elements of geography, biology, social history, foreign affairs, and environmental history. Soluri also looks at labor practices and worker’s lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, and the effects of pesticides in the Honduran environment and people. His central argument is that United States consumption of bananas causes major social, political, and environmental change in Honduras. In addition, he looks at the banana pathogens, the ways the United States treated these fungal diseases, and the terribly detrimental effects these new treatments had on the farmers on

The Michoacan state in Mexico has become the world’s largest producer of avocadoes. Although this vegetable is grown on farms throughout this state, it is also tied to an integral network of trade and export to countries across the globe. In this essay, I will argue that like any commodity chain study, the production of the organic Hass avocado has an intricate production process, which for my commodity chain study begins in Uruapan, Mexico a town in the state of Michoacan. This analysis has indicated the crucial underlying links to trade, labour, and demand that the export of this vegetable has created throughout North America

Chiquita, the oldest banana transnational in Latin America was the primary target of banana worker rights and environmental activists until 2001. The company has since teamed up with the Rainforest Alliance to roll out the Alliance’s standards to its banana farms in Latin America.6 Chiquita prides itself on its recent changes, which have involved revamping the company to promote “The Chiquita Difference”; this includes a philosophy of social responsibility, sustainability, community involvement and food safety.7 These changes arose from the use of political activism by consumers in response to poor workers rights, thus exemplifying the fact that people do realize where their food is coming from and are willing to fight for those who create it. This shows that the process of defetishization has begun for many. Production

Galeano portrays this moment in Latin American history as the instant U.S investors took control over the industries. He details the dangers they went through when producing one item to export for the benefit of foreigners, and how they later imported the processed goods from those same foreign countries, injecting money only overseas. The fact that Latin America needed imports to survive initiated the imperial link the U.S has upon it. As stated by Galeano, “The growing dependence on foreign supplies produces the growing identification of the interest of U.S. capitalists operating in Latin America with U.S. national security”11, bluntly showing the relationship between the United States and Latin America. “With petroleum, as with coffee or meat, rich countries profit more from the work of consuming it than do poor countries from the work of producing it”12. Because profit was not being retained in the Latin American countries, nationalization of the industries became of importance. The United States offered intervention in order to protect everyone’s interests with the proposal of free trade, but this was no more than another manipulation to continue having power over Latin America and its resources: “Latin America’s big ports, through which the wealth of its soil and subsoil passed en route to distant centers of power, were being built as instruments of the conquest and domination of the countries to which they belonged, and as conduits

In the book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (2008), Dan Koeppel talks about the historical background of banana. He also talks about its’ importance to African farmers and its’ importance to Latin America and Asia in economic terms. He describes that a disease called blight has caused serious threats to banana crops, as it is rapidly destroying the banana crops around the world (Koeppel, 2008). In this book, the author describes the role of two mega companies; Dole and Chiquita. They are committing massacres in the name of producing cheap banana. In Latin, America Chiquita is exploiting the labor. It also supports

While globalization is a relatively new phenomenon in theory, but not necessarily in history, as of 2009 it has created transnational corporations linked to government, international economic institutions, and non-government organizations. (Steger 67). With this definition bananas are a textbook example of the globalization of tropical fruit commodities. The transnational corporations of the United States, most notably Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte, have been linked to the governments of Latin and South America, the World Trade Organization, and the “organic” fruit movement. By tracing the path from banana plantations to supermarket it becomes clear how the “morals” of capitalism have permeated

This report details several international management problems that Chiquita has been faced with over the past two decades. Many of these problems are to do with the company’s previously poor image when it came to Corporate and Social responsibility. Over the years Chiquita faced many accusations about the conditions workers were faced with at many of their facilities in Latin America and have also had their environmental policies questioned many times in the press. The company has made great strides in recent years in improving their public image with regards to corporate and social responsibility. In particular Chiquita’s commitment to the Better Bananas Project has helped improve their public image along with the